This is somewhat both sad and funny and I thought I should share it here. I found this via Joe Youngblood on Twitter who said, an SEO who has said he "learned a few tricks" was able to sign a contract for SEO work with a big publishing company. But the sad part is, it seems he has "no idea how to do SEO for a large news website and wants tips on what to do next," Joe explained.
The guy posted about it on this Reddit thread; he wrote "I just closed a deal with top3 news outlet in my country. They want to enhance their writers SEO writing skills and audit competition and their technical SEO," I fixed some of his typos. He then asked for any advice on what to do now that he closed this deal. He asked for "any experience and tips when working with large news sites welcome." He explained the company has "250+ reporters, 200 news get published each day. About 25 different outlet brands and niches. So the scale of things worries me a bit even though I crunch out audits for businesses pretty much daily."
He then asked some novice SEO questions like "how SEO and news go hand in hand, if they go outdated in few days? Is crawl budget first thing I should look at?"
Finally, he admitted that he only "learned few tricks from here over the years so cheers to the great community."
Some of the responses on Reddit are funny:
Shouldn't umm....these be things you aught to already know if you are getting paid to do SEO for a major news outlet?
Lol pay me I’ll tell :P
Am I reading this correctly: you signed a client for whom you have no idea how to do the work?Good luck to you both!
Yes. This has been the trend the past 5 years. SEOs with no idea what they are doing keep landing big clients. I haven't quite figured out how this madness is happening but I think it might be lack of education by executives, lists of SEOs that just repeat the same expensive agencies or same people over and over, and the fact that people who are good at sales have been sold ebooks / courses on how to get rich - all of them teaching you to sell SEO and learn it later.
SEO who has "learned a few tricks" landed a big publishing company in their country, but has no idea how to do SEO for a large news website and wants tips on what to do next. https://t.co/MQNz8ZiV9f
— Joe Youngblood (@YoungbloodJoe) December 13, 2021
I guess this is not too uncommon?
I also guess you have to get started somewhere?
Forum discussion at Reddit.
